


On the Importance of Family

by bmouse



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: FIx It, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, Slightly To The Left Of Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-29
Updated: 2014-03-29
Packaged: 2018-01-17 10:27:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1384120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The latest in a string of tedious assassination attempts temporarily forces Enabran Tain to interact with his housekeeper's child. What he observes is altogether unexpected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Importance of Family

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I am sailing the USS ship Make Shit Up here. I love that Garak's actor wrote a book about his early life but I haven't read it.

They had managed to shoot Mila. Twice even, which was rather a feat. Though if he was charitably inclined he should really disqualify the second time since she had deliberately stepped into it to give him an opening. He was not a charitable man. ‘Willingness to sacrifice’ was the character of an ideal body servant and if the Head of the Order couldn’t command it in his subordinate there was no hope for anything. She had advanced his cause, that was her purpose anyway - it would be like praising a fish for swimming.

Now the room held himself, one temporarily incapacitated housekeeper, three dead bodies and one temporarily living one.

The last member of the assassination squad looked him in the eye for a cool half-second. He did not feel the need to make any sort of expression at all, merely to keep his face still. She made a gesture, something fluttering with her hands to convey ‘alas, these are the circumstances’ and then quite sensibly stabbed herself with her poisoned finger ring. This was not the house to be taken alive in.

As the corpse hit the floor there was a sound, a scurried scuffle behind him and he whipped around and nearly shot the boy. Mila’s boy. Usually she found other places for him to be, but lately she had taken to having him carry in the teapot after she delivered the morning meal. Confronted with a phaser and an irate Master of the House the child had the presence of mind to set the tray down, reaching comically upward to slide it onto the high table. The sound of the ceramic pot wobbling against the metal seemed to be the only thing in the room.

In tacit approval he moved his phaser-hand slightly to the left. Level-headedness was useful in a domestic servant, as much as in a _domestic servant_. The teapot was some tedious antique, forced on him as a public gift from a former rival and arguably worth all of his staff put together. An an assessment he privately disagreed with though never bothered to express. Its’ only real value was how keeping it prominently displayed reminded visitors of the rival’s eventual departure from politics.

Wiping his hands nervously on the hem of his tunic, the child looks around the room. He watches out of the corner of his eye, normally Mila would search and haul the bodies out but her stunner-shield doesn’t wear off for a little while yet, the wound in her arm should have self-cauterized. Someone else can clean up the mess today. Anyway she does not need his attention and is of limited interest at the moment, unlike the boy.

It’s almost compelling: how still and unruffled he is in the presence of a few bodies. How deliberately he looks at the first downed man ( his neck neatly broken by a blow from the heavy breakfast tray) how he acknowledges and observes him, truly makes sure he isn’t likely to rise before stepping over his outflung legs. 

He’s at the age where parent-profession is explained.

A scientist would begin teaching the Method. A Magistrate of Justice would get a brightly-colored age-appropriate illustration book explaining the governing laws. A state interrogator would sit their child down and explain ethics and the defense of the whole at the expense of the dissident so that when they were a little older and visited the sprawling underground complexes they would be prepared for what they saw. 

How useless, that part of his mind holds on to this knowledge. Someone with his position will never have cause to employ it. Ironically the head of the organization most-contributing to Cardassia’s future and security cannot afford to have some small person to explain these things to, cannot have children. Except he does.

Having ostensibly two careers he wonders if Mila has managed to review the basics of both. To speak for the both of them. Except she can’t. She executes, he commands. That’s been the way of it for quite some time now. Even an excellent tool is limited if they cannot see with wider eyes, can’t transition smoothly from the weapon to the hand that directs it. Someone should explain that. Too many trainees want to be the hand without understanding what it is to be the knife.

It is deeply irritating to him at that moment that the child overwhelmingly favors his mother. He has her round orbital ridges, her nose, her uncorrected rain-washed peasant eyes. Then again, one day when Mila will die he will still be able to see parts of her. He suspects that might be comforting. 

Though for that to happen the boy would have to be allowed to live to adulthood and whenever his thoughts stray (infrequently) in this direction he remains ambivalent - a sour state of affairs. Less capable people than him have decided faster about the fate of their bastards, however paradoxically intended. The child is nearly five and will soon be too large to slip unnoticed behind his mother’s skirts in the garden. 

Plants should be cultivated or they should be cut.

The end of her line had seemed like a pointlessly cruel, inefficient way to repay so many years of loyal service. He even granted her a few years’ partial leave. “Go, “ he had said “pick any man you want and secure your succession.” 

When she informed him that she had chosen him one part had been outraged at her impropriety, alert that here was the spindle’s start of some long plot hatched against him in her impeccable, impenetrable mind. Another part of him, the part that refused custom and course to limit his behavior ( his effectiveness ) had been… flattered. He was still male enough apparently that watching her swell and increase, her body marked and altered by him alone had been satisfying. Disturbing though, to find inside himself a rich vein of primitive narcissism of the sort that he despised to observe in his subordinates. 

Mila was priceless and useful in the way she helped reveal his weaknesses. 

His genes alone certainly held nothing special - his large mediocre family having produced hordes of bankers, botanists, forty-year Glinns and only one peerless Agent of the State. She has a better pedigree than him in that sense, no wonder even his coloring has yielded before hers and the boy is shale-by-the-sea. 

Advantageous, but aggravating. 

Worse, the child is beginning to cry - silently, soldier-fashion blinking the second eyelid at regular intervals to keep his eyes clear to see incoming threats. But still crying. Why now, when the threat was over? How inexplicable. Or perhaps it’s only that four and three-quarter year olds are easy to fool and Mila looks rather too still from that angle. 

Really, he has no idea why she insists on curling her hair in that elaborate fashion, but her vanity is such an old known variable he’s almost fond of it. She would cringe to see herself now, half the strands have pulled out as she’s sprawled on the floor. An emergency dart glints silvery among the cheap black pins, camouflaged neatly in her pure white hair.

“She isn’t dead.” he says aloud. To confirm his theory as much as anything.

Simple and round, the boy’s face is an amateur’s open canvas of grief and hope. Children have always struck him as so unfinished-looking. Will something later arise in his adult features to betray them? Some damning combination of Mila’s neck-scale pattern with his chin? Wariness, he is amused to note, is also noticeably present. Clearly his reputation precedes him. 

“Your mother will recover. She has been by my side for many years. I don’t make a habit of employing incompetent people who die easily.” 

That seems to reassure him at last: the right ratio of cruel possessiveness to casual certainty. They’ve barely spoken a handful of words to each other in the child’s short life, and none of them real. It would be out of character for him to be kind. 

Meanwhile the little thing’s nerved up enough to have approached Mila. Good, information from an untrustworthy authority figure should be verified. With one hand he touches her temple veins, feeling for the pulse and with the other reaches under her short jacket to pull out the backup phaser. He stands over her, wide blue eyes scanning the doorways as he tries to raise the weapon up, obviously following some litany of emergency directions she must have told him over and over. He can’t quite manage it: the power block in those smaller models is dense and heavy to compensate. His arms tremble. His small body shakes like a leaf.

_So he’s choosing to stay and guard her? Rather ineffectively. Here’s another thing to review: unless they can actually shoot someone children are just annoyances in these kinds of situations._

With a frown of obvious disgust at his inadequacy, Mila’s frown in miniature, the boy lowers the shaking phaser and sends him a desperate look over his shoulder. Reaching a decision he quickly scurries back to his master’s side.

_If you can’t use a resource, give it to someone who can. He’s aware of that much, at least. Remarkably good judgment, well above the peer-group. His Legates’ spoiled brats would have done nothing but cry._

The Head of the Order feels a small tug on his tunic. A definite breach of proper form but forgivable, given the circumstances. Shyly, eyes avoiding his face where he had looked boldly at the corpses, the boy presents the gun.

“S-she keeps a full charge in it, Sir.”

He reaches for the weapon and clarity, vile and sudden descends upon his brain.

_Now_ , it whispers. Now is the perfect opportunity. The story writes itself: a desperate remaining assassin with their nerve failing, a wild burst of laser-fire. The housekeeper’s child, late with the tea tray is caught in-between - a minor, but honest tragedy.

He will have an excuse to smash the teapot, which is antique and useful but drips annoyingly. No witnesses. Kill him now and he will never have to observe such tangible proof of his own weakness again. He will depart eventually as he should: without evidence, leaving nothing of himself to the world.

The child’s hands are so small. Small even around the grip of the compact phaser. Square palms, square nails, short nimble digits. In twenty years they will remain blunt-fingered and unassuming but grow terrifically strong.

_Ah,_ he thinks _my hands. He has my hands._

Slowly, as if pressed on from above, bent and humbled by some ancient instinct Enabran reaches down and lifts his son up.

**Author's Note:**

> Tinsnip and I were talking about Tain. Like you do, on a Tuesday, I guess. I think the prison camp gifset was going around and I was frustrated thinking ::spoilers:: what the hell was that death scene? His last words were about wee!Garak falling off the riding hound and getting back on and that he was proud of him? This from a guy who makes my skin crawl every time he's onscreen and remains firmly tied with the Female Changeling for Worst Parent in DS9 (and possibly the universe). Tinsnip then postulated that it was the last little piece of his shriveled soul, just kind of floating out like a posthumous fart.
> 
> For the fix-it challenge I decided to get ambitious and try to fix what for me is one of the most painful things in the whole story: Garak's family. What the hell, Mila, for your dodgy taste in men. What the hell, actually having a child with that guy. What the hell, Tain in general. But anyway, Mila clearly loves her son. She clearly had some kind of strong bond with his father. It's Tain and Garak that are the outliers and had to form some kind of connection. Awful as he was/is/will-be Tain is still a person. More to the point he's a Cardassian and somewhere in there the idea of 'the Family' must have been scratching to get out.
> 
> In the end, and in the long run, I'm not sure if I made things better or worse.


End file.
